Learning Arabic....or Trying Anyways

So, I started taking arabic classes this week; it's a class for faculty & staff and is held twice a week at the school. We learned the arabic alphabet and how to sound it out today. This proved to be quite an interesting experience. For each letter, our instructor points around the room to everyone and makes sure we're sounding them correctly. At one point I looked around at my middle-aged classmates, and had to laugh in my head. Here we all are desperately trying to sound out these foreign sounds and looking totally infantile and, basically, silly. Each letter has three sounds so we are all sitting there repeating "ah, ooh, eh" "bah, boo, beh" - it was when they all started sounding the same that problems arised. So we asked to differentiate between common letters and we got --> the first one sounds like "tha" and the second one like "tha"....is that supposed to help?! Baffled we are all still staring, thinking, huh? So, to clarify, he points to his mouth and says, "watch, 'tha' (pause) 'tha' ". OH! Okay, it's crystal clear now. Right! Poor guy...bunch of americans can't figure it out! He is a good teacher, I'm not making fun of him; I'm doing it at us, the students, because we look so ridiculous. Just teach me the words....